HR Technology Column

Infor, once a classic aggregator, has been quietly changing its
stripes for two years and now will noisily debut its new look on April 21. If you
recognize its new Infor HCM 10x as Lawson, Workbrain and Enwisen, it may have
failed. But how well the three work together is a lot more important than
whether they're beautiful.

As
an "aggregator" -- and there have been many others before -- it
bought software products well past their technical prime and invested only
enough money to keep them alive (not re-architect or modernize them), just
enough to continue collecting monthly maintenance fees from the base of
on-premise customers that for whatever reason felt stuck.

It's
an old business model that can't possibly work as well in a SaaS world, where
there's no large perpetual license fee paid years earlier and no separately
defined maintenance fees – just the larger monthly payment based on users that
undoubtedly has maintenance built in.

That
was certainly the view of Infor I expressed nearly six years ago in what I
thought at the time was a pretty kind column. If
you don't have time to read it, know that Infor has made a total of 34
acquisitions, including at least five HRMSes and an equal number of full ERP
software suites.

One
oldie it has kept cooking is Infinium. You may remember it as the former
Software 2000 on Cape Cod, running on the minicomputer IBM once called the
AS/400 and now the iSeries. Including HR and financials customers, Infor says
it still has about 1,000 Infinium clients, dominates the gaming industry, and still
closes new sales.

Since
hiring Charles Phillips, the former co-president of Oracle, about two years
ago, Infor has turned around, spent a lot of money on its stable of products,
and is clearly trying to become a more legitimate enterprise software company.
Not to mention being truly worthy of the title "third largest ERP."

The
first major results will be revealed at its Inforum user conference on April
21, when Infor will have a "soft launch" of its new Infor 10x ERP
products (including HCM with a small number of development partners) and
promises of General Availability sometime this summer, when the product can be
bought by anyone.

Like
any software company would, Infor's first step in this gigantic rollout was to
soften the beaches with an Innovation Summit for analysts, which produced this
fine blog from Brian Sommer,
and included individual briefings with HCM specialists like Yvette
Cameron. I suppose my briefing and this column is also a hand grenade
lobbed onto the beach, but hardly carpet bombing.

So
what exactly will they be selling as Infor HCM 10x within five months? Here's
what Tarik Taman, Infor's GM for HCM, says.

First
and foremost, Infor will be selling the former Lawson Talent Management SaaS
suite created by Larry Dunivan, who chose not to stay after the acquisition and
is now SVP and CIO at Ceridian. His suite got pretty good reviews before Lawson
was acquired, despite his use of a rich client.

Also,
the Lawson Core HRMS, which Larry inherited and was never SaaS, but instead
included on-premise applications with about 1,100 existing customers. Lawson was
offering a hybrid, co-existence model before Oracle popularized those terms
with Fusion.

Tarik
says that will end by the summer, when the Core HRMS will be SaaS; benefits is
being rewritten for the Lawson Landmark platform used for Talent Management, and
all Lawson applications will have Infor's new user interface.

No
surprise, payroll and financials will take longer to become SaaS applications
with the new UI – a year later in the summer of 2014.

The
big functional addition to Infor HCM is Workbrain, the pioneering on-premise
workforce management product created by David Ossip, who coincidentally is also
now at Ceridian as its president, following its acquisition of Dayforce,
Ossip's last workforce-management system.

Previous Columns:

Workbrain
will provide the following workforce functions in Infor HCM 10x: forecasting,
budgeting, scheduling, timekeeping and absence management. Tarik says it, too,
will be multi-tenant SaaS with a UI that "is similar but not the
same" as the rest of HCM by this summer.

In
general, integration of different applications and their many different
architectures or technical platforms, is a nagging problem for Infor. Passing
data between them, sharing processes and running consolidated reporting are the
biggest challenges. With the current focus on the value of integration, many
talent management vendors years ago rewrote acquired applications (as Infor is
doing with benefits) to make them all work together seamlessly.

But
some companies with mature products, like Infor and SumTotal, are taking a less
arduous route. So Infor will integrate Workbrain and Lawson HCM by dumping all
their data into a common holding bin – which Infor likes to call a "Big
Data Solution," though it has a code name used only interally.

Whatever
you call it, it's really no different from the way mainframe applications were
"interfaced" 30 years ago. Infor has developed some much more elegant
solutions, including middleware called ION and HTML5 on the horizon, but Tarik
says it's not clear when those will be applied to HCM, "but we'll get
there; we're halfway there."

Newsletter Sign-Up:

Given
the roaring hot market for SaaS HR applications right now (just look at the
sales numbers from Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand), it's a bit puzzling that
HCM is farther back in line for Infor's latest and greatest. Tarik says it's
because HR has unique requirements, like effective dating. OK.

Then
there is Enwisen.

The
company, based in Sausalito, Calif., put together a unique mix of
employee-centric applications before Lawson bought it and Infor took it over
months later. It had hundreds of PeopleSoft customers at the time.

It
started life as a knowledgebase, a term I suggested Authoria use 15 years ago
to avoid scaring prospects about its artificial intelligence system for
benefits questions called Beneflex.

While
Enwisen started as a poor man's Authoria (easy to do given Authoria's
astronomical price), in the last five years it has created a very sophisticated
system for search and content management, which will be the entry point for
employee and HR users of Infor HCM.

Its
other applications will also be part of HCM, including portal technology to
provide single sign-on and access to all the apps, call-center case management,
on-boarding and total-rewards statements (summer of 2014).

Enwisen
was to be Infor's home page, but now the company has written Ming.le, an
in-house social network application like Salesforce's Chatter. It enables
collaboration around objects and content and will also be available this
summer. Enwisen will still power the search.

Infor's
mission statement is to take the mature, proven software systems it owns and
integrate them with modern, innovative technologies, making them
unrecognizable, seamless and beautiful. This clearly involves plastic surgery,
not just new lipstick, which means a multi-step process with some bruising and
ugliness along the way. Will it be worth it at the end?